How to use AI assistants in the conversations inbox: 2025 guide

Let’s be honest, opening your inbox can feel like you're facing a never-ending flood of the same questions. If you're seeing a constant stream of tickets about order statuses, password resets, and refund policies, you're definitely not alone. It feels like your team spends all day typing out the same few answers while the trickier customer problems are left waiting. That’s a fast track to a burnt-out team and so-so customer service.

The good news? There’s a much better way to handle this. AI assistants, working right inside your conversations inbox, can take over the repetitive stuff. This frees up your team to focus on what people are actually good at: solving complicated problems and building real customer relationships.

This isn't about replacing your team, it's about giving them a seriously smart assistant. This guide will walk you through exactly how to add an AI assistant to your inbox, one step at a time. We'll cover everything from finding the first things to automate to finally going live with confidence.

What you'll need to get started

Diving into AI without a bit of prep is a recipe for a headache. Before you turn anything on, you’ll want to have a few things sorted out to make sure you’re pointed in the right direction.

First, you need to know what you're trying to accomplish. And "be more efficient" is a bit too vague. Get specific. Are you trying to cut your first-response time down from a few hours to a few minutes? Do you want to automatically close out common Tier 1 tickets so your team can focus on more important accounts? Or maybe you’re trying to offer 24/7 support without hiring a team across the globe. You have to know where you're going before you can start the trip.

Next, your AI needs something to learn from. An AI assistant is only as smart as the information you give it. It’s time to round up all your knowledge sources, which probably look something like this:

• An existing help center or knowledge base (think Zendesk Guide, Confluence, or Notion).

• Your most valuable, and often overlooked, resource: all your past support conversations.

• Internal documents, like product guides or policy docs saved in Google Docs or as PDFs.

Finally, you’ll need a helpdesk or communication platform that can play nicely with AI tools, like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, or even Slack. A few years ago, connecting an AI to your systems meant wrangling APIs and begging for developer time. Thankfully, things have changed. Modern AI tools like eesel AI offer simple, one-click integrations, letting you connect to your existing helpdesk in minutes without needing a technical background.

A flowchart that shows how to use AI assistants in the conversations inbox with a quick, self-serve implementation from eesel AI.

How to use AI assistants in the conversations inbox: A 5-step guide

Once you have your basics covered, it's time to start building. Here’s a straightforward, five-step way to roll out an AI assistant that actually helps your team without causing more problems than it solves.

Step 1: Find your best automation opportunities

The biggest mistake people make is trying to get the AI to do everything at once. The trick is to start with the easy wins. Your goal is to find the low-hanging fruit: the simple, repetitive questions that take up a huge chunk of your team's day.

Take a look through your support ticket history. What are customers asking over and over again? You’ll probably spot the common culprits right away:

• "Where is my order?"

• "How do I reset my password?"

• "What's your refund policy?"

Most helpdesks have reporting tools that can show you which topics or tags pop up most often. Use that data to find your top candidates for automation. If you can automate the answers to just your top 3 to 5 most asked questions, you can often knock out 20-30% of your total ticket volume from the get-go. That’s a big impact for a relatively small amount of effort.

Step 2: Give your AI a single brain

Once you know what you want to automate, you have to give your AI the right info to do its job. For an AI to give accurate and consistent answers, it needs one central place to find information. If its knowledge is scattered all over the place, it will either not have an answer or, even worse, just make something up.

This means you need to connect all those separate knowledge sources into one unified brain for the AI. You have to give it the full picture so it never has to guess. It should have access to your public help center, your internal how-to guides, and all the clever solutions hiding in your past conversations.

This used to be a painful, manual job of copying and pasting documents. But today, some platforms can do this for you. For example, eesel AI can instantly learn from all of your company knowledge, no matter where it's stored. It connects to historical tickets in Zendesk, internal playbooks in Confluence, and product specs in Google Docs to give the AI a complete understanding of your business right from the start.

An infographic explaining how to use AI assistants in the conversations inbox by centralizing knowledge from different sources.

Step 3: Tell the AI how to behave and what to do

A good AI assistant answers questions. A great one actually gets things done and has a bit of personality. This is where you turn a simple Q&A bot into a real digital teammate.

First, decide on its persona. How should the AI sound? Should it be friendly and casual, maybe throwing in an emoji here and there? Or should it be more buttoned-up and professional? Your AI is a reflection of your brand, so its tone of voice should match. You can typically set this with a simple instruction, like: "You are a helpful and friendly support agent. Always be positive and empathetic."

Next, and this is the important part, you have to let it take action. An AI that can't do anything for the customer isn't all that helpful. A powerful assistant can be set up to perform tasks, such as:

• Looking up the real-time order status from your Shopify store and sharing it directly with the customer.

• Automatically tagging tickets with "Refund Request" or "Technical Issue" to keep your inbox organized for the human team.

• Intelligently passing a conversation over to a human agent when it senses the customer is getting frustrated or has a problem it can't solve.

This kind of customization is what makes an AI assistant truly useful. With a platform like eesel AI, you have full control. You can use a simple prompt editor to define the AI's personality and set up custom actions without having to write any code. This lets you build a workflow that fits your team's process perfectly.

A screenshot showing how to use AI assistants in the conversations inbox by customizing the persona and workflow actions in eesel AI.

Step 4: Test your setup without any risk

You wouldn't launch a new product feature without testing it first, and your AI assistant shouldn't be any different. Before it ever talks to a real customer, you need to feel confident that it's going to work the way you expect. That's where simulation comes in.

Simulation is basically a practice run. You can test your AI assistant against your old support tickets to see how it would have responded. It’s a completely safe environment where you can:

• See the exact replies the AI would have sent to past customers.

• Spot any gaps in its knowledge or find areas where its answers need a little polish.

• Get a good estimate of how many tickets it will be able to handle automatically.

This step is a must for a smooth rollout. It lets you fine-tune everything without any risk. The problem is, many built-in helpdesk AI tools have very limited testing options, leaving you to more or less guess how they'll perform in the wild. One thing that really helps here is the powerful simulation mode in eesel AI. It lets you test your setup on thousands of your past tickets, giving you an accurate prediction of its performance and potential savings before you ever go live.

The simulation dashboard in eesel AI shows how to use AI assistants in the conversations inbox to predict future support automation rates.

Step 5: Go live, watch, and adjust

When you’re finally ready to launch, don't just flip a switch and walk away. A gradual rollout is always the smartest approach. Start small to minimize any potential issues and gather feedback. You could activate the AI on just one channel, like your website's chat widget, or have it handle only one of the specific question types you found back in step one.

Once it's live, keep a close eye on how it’s doing. Your analytics dashboard is your best friend here. You should be tracking:

• Which questions is the AI answering correctly?

• Where are the knowledge gaps? What questions is it getting stuck on?

• What are customers saying? Check the customer satisfaction (CSAT) score for conversations the AI handles.

An AI assistant isn't a "set it and forget it" tool. It's a part of your team, and it should get better over time based on what you learn from real conversations. Use these insights to update your knowledge base and tweak the AI's behavior as you go.

Pro tips for using AI assistants

You've got the five steps down. Here are a few extra tips to take your AI assistant from pretty good to genuinely great.

Put your inbox on autopilot with eesel AI

Bringing an AI assistant into your conversations inbox is a big move, but it doesn't have to be a complicated one. With the right plan and the right tools, you can seriously change how your support team works, leading to faster responses, a more focused team, and happier customers.

In the past, the biggest headaches were always the complexity, the risk, and the long setup times. That’s why we built eesel AI, to make this whole process a lot less complicated. You can get started in minutes, not months. You can pull all your scattered knowledge together with a single click. And you can test everything with a powerful simulation engine to feel confident before going live, all without needing a team of developers.

eesel AI Copilot drafting a response in a help desk, showing how to use AI assistants in the conversations inbox to improve productivity.

Ready to see how it works? Start your free trial with eesel AI today.